Aliens: Hive
by bsmart
Summary: A group of Pathfinders run into a true Alien hive.
1. Children of Chaos

**Aliens: Hive**

By: bsmart

**Disclaimer:** Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

"…" Normal Speech

'…' Thought

**Chapter One: Children of Chaos**

The snapping hiss of an ungodly amount of power discharging from the capacitors and into the electromagnets surrounding him announced the catapults firing in no uncertain terms. Only his suit's velvety smooth but vice-like grip kept his body from being crushed as the skipship's launcher hurled his drop pod into the vacuum. He grunted hard trying to keep the blood in his head and avoid passing out under more than thirty times his own body weight, he'd only blacked out once, on his first drop in training, he had no intention of letting it happen again.

The contrast between the shrieking roar of tortured electrons that stabbed into his ear drums during launch and the sudden utter silence when he finally cleared the barrel were startling. Only the hiss of the gel sacks releasing their death grip on his body disturbed the peace. He knew that there was nothing to hear but his ears still strained for something to focus on, eventually they began to invent things to listen too.

All too soon he heard the first whistling of the air whipping past his droppod as he fell from the stars towards the ground below. Even cocooned inside this ceramic shell he knew that by now the skipship had finished shooting off the rest of the company. Like the other eight ships making their runs right now it would let classical mechanics guide its course and allow the atmosphere of their target shove them back out into space where they would try to look as harmless as the asteroids they were impersonating, drifting away silently, for the moment.

The whistling soon grew to a howl as he plunged deeper into the atmosphere, the skipships had held onto them until the last possible moment, only firing them off just when the atmosphere of the target planet was about to start pushing them back out, assuring that the droppods would spend as little time in the sky as possible.

The urge to try and reach out and touch the sides of his pod was almost overwhelming, but in more than ninety drops he'd never been able to, the techs were always diligent to ensure that his suit was strapped down tight, he could barely move his fingers, much less his arm. It was a good thing, but still frustrating, the urge was always inexplicably there.

People always thought that drops would be exciting, plunging down from outer space to the surface of a world like a bolt from heaven, leaping from a starship and landing on the ground. In truth it was one of the most mind numbingly boring times imaginable. After spending three weeks cooped up in a ship two sizes to small, drifting along with a bunch of asteroids in a comm blackout he'd wanted to space himself, but this was worse, he was locked in this ceramic pod with no sensors, no communications, and he couldn't even move, it was like sensory deprivation but without the nice feeling of disconnectedness. There was nothing to do but sit and stare at an altimeter that was only guessing anyways. Every one of the dozens of sensors on his suit was useless until he got out of this ceramic wrapper.

He knew that a few hundred meters away the other members of his platoon, Red, Tingirl, and Snakes were all in the same position, just waiting, knowing that if they died now they'd never even see it coming. One moment they'd be plunging towards their objective and the next some lucky Skinnies' particle cannon would turn them into incandescent vapor, they'd never even see it coming much less do anything about it. That made it worse, on the ground he could do something, he could fight back and he could ensure that they stayed alive, in the air like this he couldn't do a damn thing except pray that the Skinnies stayed as stupid as fleet intel said they'd be.

"The drop on PX478 should come as a complete surprise," the young lieutenant assured them. His dark green fatigues were starched and pressed with razor sharp creases, every medal and badge was perfectly in position.

"When did they start letting babies join the service," Red asked quietly from their place in the back of the auditorium. Her own fatigue pants were a wrinkled mess, just like every other pathfinders, only her boots were immaculate, her loose gray tank top was within the regs, but only as underwear.

"Hell if I know."

"Our approach..."

"What 'our'? That twit won't get within fifteen light years of 478 until the fleet's done glassing the place."

"Red would you just shut up," Snakes scolded her.

"...will go unnoticed because we will be using a cluster of asteroids for cover. We will drift in with them all the way to the planet where the skips will release their droppods and then drift out."

"No high speed run?" one of the pilots at the front of the auditorium asked.

"No, PX478 is a vital resupply and repair base for the Dral; it's equipped with a formidable array of orbital guns and a quick response planetary shield. Even if we could plot a course that got us as close to the surface as possible the chances that they could get the shield up are too great to risk it for obvious reasons."

One of the spacers sitting next to the pilot balled up a fist and smacked it into his palm.

"Precisely, bugs on a windshield, once we drop out of hyperspace behind PX478-3 we're in full blackout. Now our objectives are here," the young operations office said pointing to a huge map of a military base. "This is the primary base on the planet. There are some other installations but those are mostly long term storage and food processing for the crops the Dral harvest here. This base is at the bottom of their skyhook's tether. They transfer material and such up the hook's central elevator to the station in geo-sync orbit and from there to the ships that dock at it. The base is defended by a division of Dral regulars but these are their B level troops, not the A's we usually fight. The reason is these orbital defenses."

The map shifted to a series of recon images of the skyhook and the several large shapes around it. "As you can see there are four of their heavy battle platforms arrayed around the skyhook," a chorus of whistles and awed whispers greeted this news, "and in addition they have a network of battlesats ringing the planet in addition to some very large orbital guns, finally the Dral have a rather sizable starfighter base on planet. And on that note I'll turn the briefing over to Colonel Ramiz."

The short thick commander of their battalion stepped forward and started to address his troops, he was obviously one of them as his own uniform was as much in disarray as any of theirs, and not a single indication of rank adorned the rumpled green clothes. "If they have to the fleet can crack this nut, but it won't be pretty so it's our job to soften things up for them. The Dral don't see this coming, they think this planet is too far behind the lines to be attacked so they don't have much of a garrison here, we're going to show them how wrong they are."

The Colonel started to pace. "As always it's up to the Pathfinders to go in first, ahead of the rest of the Legion and even the fleet, you're going to knock the Skinnies on their asses and you're gonna keep them there until the rest of the Legion finally gets their shinny metal asses planetside." A chorus of cheers greeted the usual jab at the rest of the Legion. The Pathfinders were proud of their elite status, there was only a battalion of them in the whole Legion and they always went in first to soften things up for the rest of the troops.

"So here's what we're going to do!" The images on the screen behind him shifted back to the over view of the main base but this time it was covered in multicolored notations. "Alpha company, you're hitting the shield generators at grid FD82. It will be up to you to make sure their shields go down and stay down; I'd rather not have to wait for the rest of the Legion to show up while the Fleet beats down the planetary shield. Bravo Company, your target is the airbase and garrison at BH05 and 07, make sure they don't bug us. Charlie, those battlesats are too small for their own power sources, there are three transmitting stations in the area that keep those sats juiced while they're over the base, HA34, GD12 and CE31, level'em and the fleet's job is a whole lot easier. Delta, I want those orbital guns down before your feet even hit the dirt, those things could make a mess of the rest of the Legion's a landing so it's up to ya'll to make sure that the rest of the Big Red One makes it down. As always once your primary targets are taken care of I want you causing as much mayhem as possible out there, anything without a red star on its side is a target! See your company commanders for the details of your missions."

The Colonel stopped in the center of the stage with a satisfied smile on his face, gazing out as his troops one fist shot into the air. "PATHFINDERS!"

"LEAD THE WAY!" the crowd roared back.

On paper it was simple, routine even. Just like every other combat drop he'd had as a Pathfinder, not that it mattered. The same feeling of helplessness was there, the sure knowledge that until his feet hit the ground his fate was out of his hands. All it would take it one trigger happy Skinnie gunner or one alert fighter pilot and he'd be dead, all he could do was wait.

The G's were starting to pile up quickly as his pod plunged lower and lower into the atmosphere. The howling of the air as his pod ripped it asunder had long ago grown to consume his reality, there was no sound in his world aside from the screeching winds, and no sensation but that of a groundcar sitting on top of him as the G-meter went past ten.

Just when he felt for sure that it was over, that the skip pilot had finally screwed up and sent them in too steep the crushing feeling started to subside, slowly, agonizingly the roar of the wind quieted and he traded the ground car for a swoop bike and finally nothing.

The feeling of sensory depravation just started to creep back when a soft beep announced the next leg of his journey.

With a blinding flash the pod around his split apart like some giant flower, the shell that had encased him peeling back and flying away like leaves in the wind. The straps that held him to the base of the pod popped loose and with a slight movement forward the pod base tipped spilling him off and leaving him in free fall.

Even as the pod was falling away a deluge of information started to pour into his senses. His screens came alive as his passive sensors took in the area around him and fed him the important details. He breathed a sigh of relief as all three members of his platoon had made it through. He was so busy consulting his sensors and checking his comms that it took him a solid ten seconds to finally just look.

The view was incredible, twenty kilometers up and falling like a brick he was able to see the whole of the complex they were about to assault. The planet's primary had set long ago and the only illumination was the star shine and the lights that were on in the base itself. The bluish colored lights favored by the Dral made the whole place seem like one giant jewel set in a sheet of navy blue velvet. He could see a river snaking its way down from the mountains off to the west and a huge forest that stretched out as far as he could see to the south. His revere couldn't last long though, the soft beep of his proximity sense told him that his platoon had formed up on him and it was time to go to work.

Sadly he couldn't afford to keep gazing at it. With a disappointed sigh he activated his optics sweet. The confused mishmash of greens and blues, reds and yellows would have been indecipherable to any untrained person and there were some who could never get used to it even after months of training. Combining a three hundred and sixty degree field of vision in vislight, infrared, low light, elec scan, LADAR, and mag scan sensors into a single field and then overlaying it with a heads up display was a quick way to induce a migraine until you grew used to it, but once you did it was obvious where the phrase "....like trying to sneak up on a Pathfinder..." in the Ankari military came up on. As horrid as it was to look at the view made it possible for a Pathfinder to achieve nearly perfect situational awareness.

His suit quickly determined where their landing zone was supposed to be and gave him a steering cue. He adjusted his body shape and glided towards their target. Even though there was no exterior sign that anything was going on as he fell inside his suit things were happening quickly. With ease born of hundreds of repetitions he brought his weapons on line, charging capacitors, chilling magnets, and chambering rounds. With ten kilometers left to fall his platoon spread out a little more to give each other room for the next stage.

All the manuals said that at ten kilometers you popped your chute.

Nobody payed attention to the manuals.

Every drop he tried to push it a little farther, wait a little longer to pop his chute. Every second he waited brought him more than two hundred meters closer to the ground and two hundred meters fewer he'd have to drift down under the canopy. The last drop he'd waited until five kilometers to open it, he figured he could push it another five hundred meters this time. He held the over ride right down to four point two. There was no quick jerk accompanying the opening of the chute, he weighed too much for that. The deceleration was almost gentle and took nearly ten seconds to complete. Two kilometers wasn't much room to slow down in and he knew he was pushing it but he didn't want to spend one second more in the air that necessary.

The Skinnies wound up staying dumb longer than he thought they would, he was five hundred meters from touch down when the first beam of concentrated energy lashed his metal skin. "They know we're here now!" he yelled across the comm link, not even the anti-sensor coatings applied to their armor could defeat that much energy at that short of a range so breaking comm silence didn't matter. The airbase stretched out before him and if he continued down like this they'd land right in the middle of one of the landing pads.

With three hundred meters left to drop he reached around behind him for his auto cannon, at two hundred he released the lines connecting him to his chute.

For a hundred meters he let himself fall before stomping on his jumpjets. The black of the night and the blue of the lights was momentarily overwhelmed as all four members of the platoon lit up their jets and bathed the landing pad in the pure white light of eight plasma jets.

He didn't want to land in a puddle of liquid permacrete so ten meters from the ground he killed his jets and dropped. The thundering boom of four thirty five ton metal monsters landing echoed through the night.

"Red down and ready to go."

"Snakes down, let's roll."

"Tingirl down, ready to rock."

He smiled to himself, everyone was down and fine. "Zombie down, let's rock."

"Alright, as you can see this is a pretty standard airbase one of those prefab things they just let their droids build. Two landing pads, about a four hundred meters square. On the North and South sides of both you've got their hangers and on the East sides you've got the armories. Zombie, take your platoon and hit the northeast one, Star you hit the southwest one. They're separated by about a click so just be careful that you don't send something nasty each other's ways while you hit them. Mac and Sandman will work over the garrison here."

"Oh, and it's weapons free people, you can crank your hellbores all the way up and take thermal detonators."

Zombie didn't bother to pick out a target as he dumped his mortars, he just told both tubes to fire off everything they had and trusted that the mortar rounds little electronic brains would be smart enough to pick out something important to hit. The rest of the platoon did the same and the first warning the base had that anything was wrong was the booming roar as nearly a hundred and twenty mortar rounds detonated all over the base.

One of the rounds wasn't an electronic kamikaze though and at the top of its arch it had deployed a small set of props and took up station, the electronic eyes of the little recon drone scanning for anything of interest to report to its master and the other drones like it starting to pop up all over the area.

Even as the automortars on his back were still flinging fifteen centimeters shells out Zombie was already moving towards the northern hanger with Snakes while Red and Tingirl went after the southern one. Supposedly the rest of the company was off to the north raising hell with the garrison but if any of the Skinnies got by he wanted to be the first to know about it.

The hanger was a big building, thirty meters high and nearly three hundred long, it had to be to hold as many fighters as it did. Since they just used repulorlifts and needed a rack to hold them since they had no landing gear the hanger was able to hold hundreds of them, stacked up in their racks with only a meter between them. Each of the little green ships looked like three crystalline shards flying in close formation, a central pod that held the pilot and the weaponry and the two outriggers that were all engine, all three held together by a pair of runners that were maybe ten centimeters thick at their widest. They looked incredibly delicate and without their shields to protect them and their structural integrity fields to reinforce their structure they were.

The first burst of thirty seven millimeter slugs shattered the entire back half of the first ship he fired at but he knew he'd never be able to take out the entire hanger no matter how satisfying it was to watch. Snakes hadn't wasted any time with her autocannon and had gone strait to her shoulder mounted hellbore. The first bolt of fusing hydrogen detonated at west end of the hanger and gutted a fifty meter square section of it.

Bowing to the need for expediency Zombie shouldered his own rifle and reached for his hellbore. Judging by the hole she'd made Snakes had kept her hellbore turned down, Zombie cranked his all the way up, this is what he loved about his job and without a single civie on the planet there was nothing to hold back for.

His first shot clipped a fighter and then detonated. Like the miniature sun that it was the detonation swelled outward consuming all, its heat and light swamped some of his sensors but he was able to watch as roiling plasma consumed nearly a third of the gigantic hangar. The blast wave shattered dozens of fighters in the surrounding areas but the hangars structural integrity field was able to withstand the shock.

As a blackened wall collapsed to the ground Snakes muttered over the comlink, "Show off." Her next shot similarly devastated the south end of their hangar and a moment later their combined fire eliminated what little was left of the tortured structure.

"Shit!" Red hissed. "Runner!"

Zombie spun around but Snakes was quicker, so quickly that it was hard to believe she was encased in nearly forty tons of war machine. A single green crystalline fighter had apparently been manned as it was darting out of the hanger Red and Tingirl had been working over. The little starfighter was accelerating rapidly but it had never been designed to operate at high speed but low altitude. A stream of autocannon fire tore up the ferrocrete in its wake but it was moving to erratically to get a good shot at. Snake's Daemon missiles had no such problems as a pair of the anti-armor missiles found the wallowing ship and ripped it apart.

"Good shooting Snakes," Zombie said.

"South clear," Red reported.

"North clear," Zombie replied. "Let's hit the ancillaries."

Red and Tingirl jogged to catch up and in a wedge they advanced towards the north end of the base, towards the barracks, the machine shops and the armories. With the fighters destroyed there really was no reason to get in a rush about taking out the support system for them. Instead of hellbores and thermal detonators they'd use their autocannons and flamers.

Zombie didn't know if it was the meds his suit was pumping into him or some sort of conditioning that had been part of his training or if he was just the sort of sociopath that the Pathfinders looked for but...this was one of the times he truly felt alive. Striding across the battlefield, five meters tall, he felt like he was invincible, unstoppable, the avatar of some long forgotten war god, he would crush and destroy and lay waste to his enemies and there was nothing they could do about it. Unbeknownst to him the same evil smile that adorned his face caressed the faces of his three charges.

As they approached the auxiliary buildings all four of them fanned out, Red for the maintenance shops, Tingirl towards the motor pool and fuel tanks, Snakes for the armories and Zombie, he headed towards the control centers and barracks.

In one of those quirks of similar evolution the Dral, like most humanoid species had arrived at the conclusion that a tower was the best building design to oversee an airbase. While the Dral's version of a control tower looked more like it was grown out of crystal its function was obvious. In quick succession all six bombardment rockets erupted from the hip packs they had resided in and slammed into the base of the tower. In six quick blasts the towers supports were destroyed and it toppled to the ground and shattered like a vase dropped on the floor. Stepping over broken pieces of tower the size of a ground car Zombie moved deeper into his assigned area, turning the control center into a glowing crater with two quick hellbore shots.

With the control center destroyed Zombie paused for a moment near one of the barracks buildings to take stock of what his platoon was doing. Tingirl chased a fleeing transport truck with a line of autocannon fire until it caught the fleeing groundcar and cut it neatly in half. In the distance he saw Snakes let loose with one of her Lance missiles. The big missile had been designed to help drop small gunships and good sized mechs, the door to a weapons cache wasn't that much of an impediment. There was a small flash when it hit the door and nearly a full second later the entire bunker lifted nearly two meters before the top of it erupted in a volcanic explosion that sent clods of dirt and ferrocrete into the sky. He was just turning to see what Red was up to when he heard her yell, "Zombie, skinnie on your ten!"

Seev-tijc was happy with his life. Others were off winning glory for whichever god their Kitth venerated most just like the clerics said they should desire to but he was perfectly happy on Siprac garnering no glory and living to tell about it. The war against the Ankari wasn't going well by most accounts. Of course the clerics and their pawns claimed they were winning great victories, bringing glory to the gods and crushing the infidels but he knew better. You couldn't watch single ships, ships so savaged that they were more use as scrap, ships that used to be with entire squadrons, whole fleets, limp back here for refit and actually think they were winning. The crews were almost always quarantined, prevented from coming planetside but rumors still came out. The officers said that it was just one ship with a run of bad luck that needed some minor repairs. The rumors said that they were actually the lucky ships.

Still Seev was happy with his lot. Siprac was too far from the fighting and too well protected to be a target anytime soon, no the clerics would realize their error, sue for piece with the Ankari, and call it a great victory long before the first Ankari cruiser showed up in orbit. So long as he continued to make himself useful, but not too useful, his place and person were safe.

His unease with the war wasn't entirely with his odds of survival. Unlike many of his comrades Seev wasn't particularly religious, at least not religious in the since of following the clerics. In his mind they had too much personally involved in the worship of the gods to truly be the impartial emissaries they claimed to be. His unease came from somewhere else; it came from the very word Ankari, or rather in his tongue, Ankar-i. In the modern tongue it meant nothing, just a name, but in the ancient tongue...in the ancient tongue it meant something. The oldest histories, the ones that no one was allowed to read or even speak of told of a time long long ago, so long ago that the very mountains were different. A shining time, a time when the Dral had been a mighty people, when the Dral had had an empire that had spanned the stars, and empire bigger than they had today but hundreds of thousands of years before the first Dral should have even looked outside of his cave. They told of a war, a war between the gods in which their servants had been pitched against one another. The servants of the gods of order had been know as the Taidan and many had flocked to their banner, including the Dral, the gods had favored them and blessed them, before the war it had been a glorious time. Then came the war, for millennia, for generations the Taidan and their allies had warred against the servants of the gods of chaos. The war had gone in their favor for an age with many worlds converted, with many servants of the dark gods thrown down, then they had come. They drove back the alliance of light and for a time it looked like they might triumph, like the entire galaxy would fall before them and only a final suicidal assault by the Taidan ended the war in a stalemate, a stalemate that drug everyone into a dark age that was only know ending. The dark ones who had thrown back the servants of light and who had nearly triumphed were known as the children of the war god.

The Ankar-i.

None of this was on Seev's mind when the first rippling explosions tore the peace of the night apart it wasn't even on his mind as the hangars disappeared into miniature suns, but it was most definitely on his mind as he ripped open the door to his barracks. In the distance he saw a twelve gyt tall red humanoid marching through the machine shops which were already burning. The red monstrosity was belching flame from its arms and its weapons ripped apart buildings left and right. Another one that was covered in a writhing mass of serpents caused the earth to rip itself apart before it destroying the contents of a bunker. Behind him he heard but couldn't see the footfalls of another of these monstrosities. Both sets of his knees weakened and he gripped the frame of the door trying to steady himself as he began to lose control of himself to his terror. It was only when he looked up again that he realized one of the monsters had been but a few dozen gyt from him the entire time. Backlit by the flames of the red one and illuminated by the blast of the serpent covered one's weapons he finally saw it.

The terror was black as night, it seemed to drink in the light around it, but as another flash illuminated it he realized he was wrong. While much of it was black, deep rents were cleaved into the creature exposing it's entrails to the night. Green and blue ichor leeched down its body. As almost a final insult to all that was good the creature's skull was laid half bare, the gore of its last kill staining its bone and skin a sickening azure and verdant green. Splashed across the things chest in blue blood and stilted Dral was the phrase, 'Abandon all hope'. As he sank to his knees Seev-tijc did just that, even the whirring of some hidden machinery that revealed the thing to be a machine was little comfort, the dark one's had returned. His silent prayer that he would die before having to witness it was granted as Zombie's point defense chain guns ripped him in half.

"Neutralized," Zombie said emotionlessly across the comm.

Author's Notes

**Acknowledgements:**

**Notes:**

1) Yes, this has next to nothing to do with Aliens so far and is one of the biggest sci-fi cluster…you knows well ever.

Feedback: 

Come on over and bitch me out: http:s87753679.onlinehome.us/forums/index.php?actidx

For updates and just my general bitching: 

You don't need to tell me I suck, I'm well aware of that.


	2. Babysitters

**Aliens: Genocide**

By: bsmart

**Disclaimer:** Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

"…" Normal Speech

'…' Thought

**Chapter Two: Babysitters**

Colonel Marco Ramiz bounced up in down in his seat as his driver drove their purloined ground car up the red clay hill to where his battalion had camped out. Someone of his rank would normally have his own VTOL to use for transportation but like many who'd come up through the ranks of the Pathfinders he had an intense dislike of being disconnected from the ground. He might have been able to make a more dignified ascent but he was busy looking off to his right at the view of the former Dral base.

Black smoke still rose from a dozen fires large and small all over the base. Since very little to none of it was usable for the Ankari it was most likely that they'd just let it burn rather than waste time saving something worthless. All over the base buildings were reduced to rubble, anything over three stories high was rare and some of the three story high structures were just the remains of much larger buildings, one had even crumpled in on itself leaving the top two stories virtually intact and sitting on a pile of rubble that used to be the lower five floors. Not even the skyhook's tether had escaped the destruction and the first few kilometers of it laying in a tangle near the base of the old elevator. For something that had stretched all the way to geo-sync orbit it had fallen surprisingly lightly. Marco had grown up in a city that had a skyhook base in it and he still couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that something that enormous fell like a feather to the ground. He'd grown carbon nanotubes for a science competition and they still amazed him, even if it was technology that was ancient.

Throughout the general destruction that had been the Dral base several points of near absolute destruction existed. Where other parts of the complex had been reduced to rubble by the rest of the Legion in many of these areas there was simply nothing.

Marco smiled. He had expected to see this when he'd been told his boys and girls would be totally weapons free in this engagement but it still pleased him to see it. Kilo for kilo a Pathfinder was the most heavily armed unit in the Ankari military, bar none. Hellbores, plasma rifles, and thermal detonators had turned bunkers into craters, tanks into glass, and Dral into vapor.

The former fighter base and garrison epitomized all of this. The only way to spot it was the two landing pads that were still there and then go north to find where the garrison had bee, aside from that everything else was simply gone. Bravo Company was nothing if not exuberant.

He frowned, Bravo company, specifically Zombie's platoon was on his mind. Normally Marco didn't mind working with the Legion's Operation's Command, the Big Red One was one of the tightest run outfits in all of the military but it still came down to people running it, and people were generally assholes. The Pathfinders were the elite of the Marines, there were none better and everyone knew this and everyone treated them as such. He was only a colonel in charge of a battalion but his opinions often carried weight similar to that of any of the three division commanders of the Legion, which is why things like this pissed him off.

Every once in a while some little shit in the ops department got it in his head to teach the "High and Mighty" Pathfinders a lesson by giving them some crap assignment. Most would be shot down by someone with some sense of decency but every so often one would make it through. He supposed he could go up the chain and find someone to bitch at to get it retasked but that wasn't his style, that wasn't the style of a Pathfinder, he'd do as he was told like it or not.

As the ground car finished its climb up to the top it emerged into a land of brightly colored giants and drab dwarves. Nearly four score of riotously colored metal monsters stood silent watch at the top of the hill, some kneeling, some standing, and around their legs buzzed the hundreds of people who made them kill.

Almost every one of the battalion's gears was in some state of disrepair; you don't challenge a planetary garrison without getting some scars to show for it. Techs had panels removed from almost every single one of the gears, some were simply replacing circuit boards or mynomer bundles, and one gear was supported in a stand like some five meter high paraplegic while a leg was reattached. Almost every one of the gears was being loaded back with ammunition, fuel and other consumables.

Even in this sea of activity second platoon Bravo company was easy to find. While all the pathfinders painted their machines in some obscenely garish colors, forgoing camouflage for psychological impact, second Platoon was easy to find, mostly because sergeant Langley had painted her gear a uniformly eye searing red. A few touches of orange and white provided accent but it was still a red gear.

He found the company the way he always did, with all four gears in a small circle kneeling facing inward. A big blue tarp was strung between the gear's heads and shoulders while their arms held onto a huge sheet of cloth making the world's, this one's, largest shaded hammock.

Zombie yawned and rolled over, pushing an empty ration pack over the edge of the "nest". He was barely conscious and would have soon been back in a deep slumber if not for the loud honking of a ground car horn. He peered up over the edge of the hammock, his sleep addled brain hoping that it wasn't directed at them so he could get some more rest. It took him a moment to process what he saw but as soon as his brain processed the imaged of the Colonel standing beside their gear's he snapped awake and started trying to get the rest of his platoon up.

Colonel Ramiz watched in amusement as the makeshift hammock started to rattle and snap and muffled curses were heard as the people asleep on it woke up. He couldn't blame them for sleeping, they'd fought for almost two days straight and he'd soon be looking for an opportunity to get a solid four hours free so that he could get a good night's rest, even if it was in the middle of the day.

Master Sergeant Delaat and his platoon quickly tumbled from their resting place and scrambled down the side of the nearest gear so that they could line up in front of him. All four of them looked like they'd been run through the ringer then drug a click behind a hovercraft, for normal Marines they looked like they'd just got out of two days hard fighting, for Pathfinders they looked fresh as cvit flowers.

Colonel Ramiz decided to let them stew and took a moment to look them over. Zombie, Master Sergeant Delaat, was unremarkable as Ankari went, a little on the short side with green hair and blue eyes but totally unremarkable. He was perpetually trying to grow a goatee, regulations be damned, but it never seemed to get passed the scruffy stage. He was too young and too low in rank to really be running a platoon but Pathfinders tended to advance quickly in their commands if not their ranks, not that rank really counted for anything in the Pathfinders, only command really did. In another decade or so he'd have enough time in grade to get his promotion but by then he'd probably be running Bravo Company. He was a rising star and like all rising stars his rank never caught up to his ability. Zombie had wound up with his moniker from his love of tri-D non-interactive movies that featured the undead. After he'd commandeered the holodeck for the fifth time in his first week as a Pathfinder to watch them he'd been christened with his handle. The gear they'd all climbed down was Zombie's and like most Pathfinders he'd taken his inspiration for its paint job from his handle. The gear looked like some matt black undead creature and like always he'd painted some phrase on its chest in the native language of whoever they were fighting.

Where Sergeant Langley's handle came from was painfully obvious, the curly red hair that adorned her head had gotten her the callsign Red in five seconds flat. She normally kept the tight little ringlets in a bun on the back of her head but she'd let them down to sleep. She was a little tall and skinny for an Ankari, a species that tended to be shorter and stouter than the other "human" races. The colonel snorted at that, how those little colony brats had gotten their species name to be used to describe all five of the sister spices he didn't know, especially since they all agreed, even the Juraians, that the Ankari were the oldest and probably ancestor of all their races. Red had a mouth on her but she always managed to stay just this side of a court martial, stopping just before someone would write her up. Marco thought her handle and gear suited her perfectly.

Tingirl, Staff Sergeant Ito, was short even by Ankari standards but that had more to do with her body's maker than genetics. Exactly what percentage of her was original and what was aftermarket he didn't know but just by looking at her you knew that she hadn't been born with the arms and legs that were on her now. She kept her dark violet hair short and she smiled a lot which made her seem like she was only fifty or sixty instead of an adult. She'd taken an airbrush to her gear and contrary to the spirit of her handle, she insisted that the only tin in her body was as an alloying compound for her high pressure blood lines, she coated it in a patch work of obnoxious orange, purple, and red shapes making it look like the machine had been camouflaged by a colorblind idiot. It was unanimously agreed to be the most hideous paint job in the battalion, and everyone loved her for it.

Snakes, she claimed it wasn't worth her time to try and teach everyone how to pronounce her actual name and Marco agreed after seeing her file, wasn't even an Ankari at all but a Twi'lek, one of the Confederation's member races. She was every bit as tall as Zombie but her skin was light blue with the sheen of wet vinyl. She was completely bald but at the crown of her head a pair of thick, fleshy, and surprisingly prehensile appendages emerged. Commonly called head tails, properly called leeku, Snakes normally kept them hanging over one shoulder and across her chest but she could really do anything she please with the seventy centimeter long appendages and when she got excited they began to get into the act when it came to talking. Pathfinders tend to bond quickly and permanently and in Snakes case the trial to determine if she could be one of them had been brutally simple. He had been informed of her handle by an overactive JAG lieutenant who had told him that that could get everyone in a lot of trouble. Rather than ride in and force a change on them, and possibly alienating her from her unit permanently, Marco had let it slide. Snakes rose to the challenge in perfect Pathfinder form, she'd painted her gear in a dizzying pattern of interlocking Snakes, making it look like the machine was covered in a slithering mass or reptiles that seemed to move anytime you weren't looking directly at it.

Deciding that he'd let them fester long enough Marco finally spoke up. "I trust I wasn't disturbing anything."

"No sir Colonel sir," Zombie answered.

The colonel smirked. "Uh huh. I have an assignment for you; this came down from Legion Ops so pay attention." He walked over to Zombie's gear and sat his datapad in the knee joint so that everyone could see it when he called up the first image. "This is a research station way up north on the edge of the polar desert on the side of a mountain." On the screen a satellite image of a large building with several outlying structures came up. "When the fleet came roaring in a small shuttle blasted out of here and made it out before the spacers were in a position to stop it. Ops and Intel want to know what's going on up there."

"One shuttle sir?" Snakes asked.

"Just one, and it wasn't even that big, which is why we're so curious about this, that's just one item in a long list of strange things about this place. The central building there," he pointed at the screen, "is large enough to comfortably house several hundred people even if most of it's unoccupied, the shuttle that left could house maybe ten, if they packed in. Also the station has a pair of power generators, but not just any gens, they're hypermatter reactors with a combined output somewhere north of nine terawatts."

"Holy hell..." Zombie whispered.

"There are fleet frigates that don't have that much juice," Tingirl said.

"Precisely, and the biggest strangeness is the fact that this isn't a Dral building but it's been operating since the first recon drone came whipping through the system about a couple of months ago, it wasn't here when the survey drones mapped this place a decade ago."

"So what are we supposed to do about this?" Zombie asked.

"Ops is sending in a platoon of light Marines along with couple of analysts to do a preliminary sweep. The past three sensor sweeps haven't detected any life forms but your platoon is being chopped to them to provide fire support..."

A chorus of groans erupted from the four Pathfinders.

"...if they run into anything."

"We're playing babysitter," Red grumbled.

"Hey," snapped the colonel, "I'm not thrilled with sending ya'll to go nursemaid a bunch of Marines either but these are orders from Legion Ops, we will do it. Zombie, how long before you can be ready to move out?"

"Fifteen minutes!" the dropship's loadmaster yelled out as Zombie strode past him and climbed the ladder up to the ship's command deck. Inside the cockpit the howl of the engines that pervaded the cargo deck dropped off to an angry whisper. While the pilot and co-pilot watched their controls Zombie turned to the jumpseat behind them where Lieutenant LevKil was sitting watching his monitors intently with his Master Sergeant looking over his shoulder.

The Lieutenant had annoyed him just as soon as he'd shown up at the landing field with the platoon. LevKil had started right in on them, attempting to dress them down for not saluting him, haranguing them for their slovenly dress, the dirt, grease and soot on their gears, even the paint jobs on their gears. Zombie was about to say something to the Lieutenant which would undoubtedly send the little martinet into a tizzy and probably get them out of this mission, since they'd be awaiting their court-martials when LevKil's Master Sergeant cut in.

"How many combat drops have you been on son?"

Zombie smiled at the Sergeant's ploy. "Ninety eight as a Pathfinder, thirty three before that," he said with a grin. "How about you?"

"Sixty seven."

The Lieutenant who just a second before had been winding up for another tirade deflated like a balloon. Zombie knew exactly what was going on, undoubtedly the Lieutenant had learned to rely on his sergeant and look to him for advice and now in one fell swoop the man he thought of as an all knowing titan had been shown to be only half as experienced a soldier as the man he was trying to berate. Whatever nit he had been about to pick fled his mind and he simply said, "Get your people stowed away and meet me on the flight deck when you get the chance.

That had been the last thing that LevKil had said to him before now and the Lieutenant's inelegant attempt to establish a pecking order still left a foul taste in his mouth, of course you needed to know unequivocally who was in charge in a military operation but dressing them down for their gear's paint jobs was not the way to go about it. "You wanted to see me sir?"

LevKil spun his seat around and immediately frowned when he saw that Zombie wasn't saluting him but he didn't press the issue. "Yes, I wanted to discuss the mission with you."

The Lieutenant turned around and started to work at his terminal so Zombie and the Master Sergeant peered over his shoulders at the image that was on the screen. He'd just realized that the image was moving slightly when the Lieutenant spoke.

"Regimental Ops hacked a drone to us so we'll have coverage for the entire operation, it arrived on station a few minutes ago and this is the feed." The computer shifted the feed through the drone's various sensors but none showed anything of any real interest aside from the magscan. "As you can see aside from the main compound and the pair of generators to the north there isn't much of interest save this underground power conduit." On the screen a thick purplish blue line connected the two generators and then headed off directly west. A much smaller line branched off the main heading south but after a few hundred meters is grew dim and disappeared. "The main power conduits for the generators head off to some underground installation to the west but whatever it's powering doesn't show up on the scans, it might be too deep. The smaller line is probably the tap to the compound, for some reason it's terminated here and the rest of the line is de-energized, which is consistent with what we're seeing in the compound. It's cooled to almost ambient, minimal activity on the elecscan, looks deserted."

"We'll probably want to check what's going on with that feeder line," Zombie offered.

"Yes we will but for the moment I want to worry about the landing and security. There's a landing pad here to the east of the compound, but we're going to avoid it. I want to drop your Pathfinders at the northeast and southwest corners of the compound, a pair each."

"Sounds good sir, we can sweep around the perimeter and make sure everything looks tight."

"Exactly, and while you're doing that Sergeant Frost and myself will land with the platoon on top of the main building and clear it."

"Ten minutes!"

"That sounds like a plan sir," Zombie said.

"There is one more thing. To the south of the mountains this place is in there's a deciduous forest but to the north is the polar desert, sats show that there's a big dust storm rolling it, it'll probably hit us a few hours after we land. Since we don't have any hypercomms on your suits or the dropship we'll have to rely on the drone for a comm relay outside since we're on the opposite side of the planet from the main landing force."

"Yes sir."

"You'll probably want to go get in your suit now."

"Yes sir."

After a quick pulse of his jumpjets Zombie let himself drop the last fifteen meters to the ground. A swirl of parched grayish brown dust swirled around his feet for a moment before being swept away by the wind that was blowing steadily through the pass to their north.

"When the storm gets here that pass will sandblast this whole area," Zombie said over the Pathfinder's private channel. "Why the hell would you build a research station here?"

"Maybe they got a deal on the land," Snakes said as the dropship whirled above them and scooted off to drop off Red and Tingirl on the other side of the compound.

"Musta been a damn big discount."

"Red and Tingirl down," Red reported. "Looks quiet."

"Yeah, alright, you know the drill. Let's go for a walk," Zombie said. The plan was very simple, the pairs of gears had been dropped off at opposite corners of the compound, they'd both circle the compound once in the same direction stopping when they got back to where they'd started. It would make sure that every square centimeter of the area would be observed by four sets of eyes.

The whole plateau they were standing on was coated in the grayish brown dust, but every sentient made surface was clean, there was enough wind whipping across the plateau to keep everything blown off but not enough to start a sandstorm. As they trudged east across what was considered the front of the compound, the north side that faced the rest of the mountain, they came across the communications pad, a low slung bunker with a collection of dishes and antennas adorning its crown like a stand of weeds. "Comm shed's cold," Snakes reported, "No thermal, no elec, nothing."

"Must have taken a feed off the branch line that powers the main building."

"Must have, I can see termination of the line way off there but I don't see any damage."

Zombie turned his attention to where the power tap for the compound ran, increasing the priority of the elec scanner in his display as he did. He could easily see the power conduits running from the mostly buried generators to wherever the headed and the tap that was supposed to supply the buildings with power, but the line went dark two thirds of the way along it. A quick mag scan check confirmed that the line was still present under them but for some reason it was de-energized. "We'll have to check that out, let's get moving."

The north side was bare of any sentient construction aside from the comm bunker and the power generator off in the distance, but the generators were low slung with only a few meters of ferrocrete peeking up out of the dusty ground and against the back drop of the dark grey mountain they disappeared if you weren't looking right at them. The mountains themselves started back towards the heavens three kilometers away, the plateau shelf itself was covered in crags and boulders, good cover if you wanted to assault the area. The pass between the mountains and out towards the polar desert was a vertical gash that divided the mountain closest to them from the rest of the chain. The mountain whose plateau this station had been built on stretched around the west side a bit but soon its slope blended together with that of the plateau. The backside of the compound was busier; numerous low sitting bunkers dotted the area between the back of the main building and the edge of the plateau. Off to the south the plateau rapidly dropped off down a not very gentle slope to the forest eight hundred meters below.

"Third Platoon, dropping," LevKil's voice was calm and emotionless, just the way Zombie thought it should be and his opinion of the young lieutenant went up, young being quite relative.

Zombie glanced up just in time to see the winged brick shaped transport blast away from the top of the three story building. From the time LevKil announced his platoon's drop to the time the ship had blasted clear not even a twenty seconds had passed.

"Starting to clear the building."

"Blue six this is Zombie, sweep seventy percent complete, all clear so far."

A double click on comm was the only acknowledgement to Zombie's report.

As they started up the west side of the main building Zombie and Snakes passed by the landing pad that had served the station. The pad was devoid of any ships but a mobile crane and refueling bowser still sat in the middle of the pad. They had avoided the pad for landing because it was the most obvious place to set down and therefore if anything was booby trapped that would be it. A few moments later they were back where they'd started. "Spread out, four corners."

"Command center clear," and unfamiliar voice of one of LevKil's squad leaders said.

"Exterior clear," Zombie answered back. The trip around the place hadn't taken long, even at two hundred meters on a side the gears could have circled the main building in less than a minute, their slow walk had let them make a more thorough inspection but had still only taken five.

In the distance the dropship circled, waiting for the all clear.

"Med bay, I think, clear."

"Third floor clear."

Zombie absent mindedly scanned his sensors but he was paying a lot more attention to what was going on inside. Close quarters drills were the thing he'd enjoyed most about his Marine training and probably the only thing he missed about the old Marines. His gear was simply too big to go fight indoors, unlike the Marines in their Helot exo-skeletons.

"Second floor clear," Sergeant Frost confirmed.

"Garage clear."

Zombie checked his crono, the building was damn big for just a platoon to clear but it looked like LevKil's boys had done it in less than fifteen minutes, pretty damn impressive, for Marines.

"Zombie, Blue six, bring your platoon into the garage on the north side of the building and meet me in the command center."

"Roger."

The garage was easy to find, a two story high door had opened on the front of the building exposing a large enclosed garage on the front of the building. As the four metal giants walked inside Zombie noted a good dozen ground cars and crawlers in the stalls on either side of the central concourse. All of them looked like they were ready to go at a moments notice. Towards the back were six large stalls but only one was occupied, by a large long distance crawler.

"Where the hell is everyone?" Red asked.

"That's what we want to find out. Everybody pick a stable and park it."

Zombie walked his gear into one of the large stalls and kneeled down before putting the suit in standby and cracking the chest plate. The thick armored plate slid forward a few centimeters before starting to swing up and open on silent hydraulics. Satisfied that everything was powered down Zombie disconnected from the neural interface and put up with the momentary nausea that always accompanied separation from his metal body. Satisfied that his lunch was going to stay where it should he leaned forward and grabbed the bar that was attached to the inside of the chest plate of the gear, using it and his upper body to pull his legs out of the leg sleeves of his suit and then set them down on the thighs of his mount. He turned back and retrieved his pants, boots, hat, and a pulse carbine from the locker tucked away inside his gear so that he'd be presentable to the lieutenant. The occasional intense heat of operating a gear along with the need for the neuroreceptors in his suit to have a clean interface with his nervous system meant that gear pilots rarely wore more than a pair of shorts and a tank top.

When he and the rest of the platoon were presentable and armed they all met up with the trooper who was standing beside the doorway into the rest of the facility. The Marine was wearing his exoskeleton and consequently stood more than two meters high. The gray and black armor's camo system had been shut down or else it would have been trying to blend in with the surrounds. The exoskeleton completely encased the trooper and they wouldn't even have been able to tell it was a he if the boy hadn't had his visor raised.

"I'll show you to the command center."

"Lead the way private."

The hallways of the building were a little higher than would have been normal in an Ankari building, but their inverted truncated pyramidal shape made them seem much smaller than they were. Their guide was constantly ducking light fixtures and pieces of debris hanging from the ceiling. His armor had been optimized for fighting outdoors, it made him faster, stronger, tougher, and better informed than an unarmored infantry but it had not been designed to make it easier to get around indoors.

'At least they didn't send Elementals,' Zombie thought. The Ankari heavy infantry used three ton armored suits and would have filled the entire hallway top to bottom, side to side.

"All the levels are like this," the trooper said indicating the mess around them. Pieces of filmplast littered the hallways like somebody had dumped a notebook out in front of a fan. All around them the walls were covered in gouges, even the ceiling, looking for the world like somebody had just beat the hell out of the walls with a pick, and every once in a while they could see some blood spatter. "The command center is the only place that looks normal, there's some major damage to its doors but that's about it," he said as he shoved a piece of fallen conduit out of his face.

All five of them walked up a flight of stairs to the third floor. When they opened the doors they saw the battered doors of the command center just a few meters down the hall in front of them flanked by a pair of Marines. "Here you go," the trooper said with a wave of his hand. The Pathfinders all piled out into the short hallway to the center but the Marine headed back down.

"What happened here?" Red asked as they neared the dark blue doors.

The seam of the doors was chipped and pitted and in the corner a portable drill and reciprocating hammer lay discarded, the bit of the hammer ruined and the bit of the drill was deformed like a wax sculpture held to close to a flame. All across the door were splashes of dried blood, some of it blue but most of it was red and the entire surface was covered in those pick marks they had seen in the hallway on the way up.

"I think somebody wanted in," Snakes said.

As they approached the Marines on either side of the door paused their conversation to observe them and then started back. To everyone's surprise the doors parted easily when they pushed them back into their pockets, the sheet metal seemingly oblivious to the morbid tableau on them. In contrast to the dark and wrecked gray and blue corridors that led up to the command center the center itself was remarkably clean. Notebooks and manuals sat open in front of consoles while cups of liquid sat nearby like they expected their owners to return at any moment. Displays and screens sat blank and lifeless but the whole room looked like it everyone had simply dropped whatever they were doing and had left. Around the perimeter of the room was a raised platform with more work stations that had a view out some huge picture windows that gave a three hundred and sixty degree view of the surroundings from atop the building. Through the west side windows he saw the dropship hovering over the roof while the analysts hopped down from the landing ramp with their bags in tow. A couple of Marines gathered up their charges and ushered them towards an open door on the roof.

The Lieutenant was standing next to a large blank display table and his comm tech had set up shop on top of it. LevKil was busy talking to one of his subordinates but as they approached he dismissed them and set the handset down on the table.

"Reporting as ordered...sir," Zombie said.

"Anything worth noting outside?"

"No sir, nothing we didn't see on the recon. Do we know what happened here?"

"Not at the moment. So far we haven't found anyone here, dead or alive. One of the techs already scanned the blood that seems to have been tossed all over the place, some Dral, a lot of Haurduran and Kizikan, and even a little Vaygr."

"Sir?!" Red stammered.

"I have no idea what any of those are doing here besides the Dral but this building is a Vaygr design, and the weapons in the armor are Vaygr phasers."

"The Dral hate the Vaygr, you'd get a Falcon and Wolf to say something nice to each other before you could get a Dral and a Vaygr to do anything besides try to kill each other," Snakes said.

"That may be true sergeant but the blood doesn't lie."

"How old is the blood sir?"

"Looks like it's about a week old, whatever happened happend right before we showed up in orbit. Power's out to the whole facility but my troopers found an auxiliary generator down on the second sublevel, they're working on get..."

The overhead lights snapped on above them dispelling the darkened gloom in the center with their own fluorescent glow.

"...ting it turned on."

"We've got it running sir," a small voice said from the handset, "it still had a charge on the capacitors."

While LevKil thanked his men Zombie watched as all around the center computers started to boot up and one by one bright red flashing error messages started to pop up.

"The hell, it's all in basic!" Red said.

Sure enough all the machines were reading out in standard Galactic basic, a language that had been settled upon millennia ago as the common language of the Galaxy. While everyone still had their own native languages most sentients knew at least a smattering of basic, either written or spoken, whichever one they could handle.

"Maybe they were all working together," Tingirl said as she sat down at the nearest console and started to try and work it.

"What? Repeat last," LevKil said before hitting the speaker on comm pack.

"Our sensors are screwed up sir, when the power came back up they went all to hell!" one of the squad sergeants reported. "There are big blind spots all over the place now; we can't get any good readings."

"Where are they sir?" Zombie asked the Lieutenant as he slid up beside him.

"West end of the floor, some kind of labs."

"I can't get a clear reading at all," the annoyed platoon leader said.

Suddenly in the background someone yelled, "What the hell was that?"

"Hold on sir," the sergeant on the comm said and then his voice sounded distant, "Whatta ya got Bargaa?!"

"I dunno, thought I heard something sir," the trooper said.

The sergeant got back on the comm. "Sorry sir, just a false al..."

With a sudden squelch of static another voice cut into the line and in a high pitched panicky voice someone yelled, "I've got movement Sarge!"

Author's Notes

**Acknowledgements:**

**Notes:**

1) From zero Aliens to total rip off in one chapter flat, how do I do it?

Feedback: 

Come on over and bitch me out: http:s87753679.onlinehome.us/forums/index.php?actidx

For updates and just my general bitching: 

You don't need to tell me I suck, I'm well aware of that.


	3. Under Control

**Aliens: Hive**

By: bsmart

**Disclaimer:** Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

"…" Normal Speech

'…' Thought

**Chapter Three: Under Control**

"I've got movement Sarge!"

Zombie and his platoon were already charging out of the command center before the private at the other end of the signal even began to say "Sarge". Zombie only knew that the squad who was reporting contact was on the west end of the floor; he figured that the commotion would point out exactly where they were.

Zombie had just finished cocking his rifle when he ran head long into a squad of Marines who were pouring into the hallway from some sort of lab. The marines took little note of the four Pathfinders as they followed a pair of their own down the hall. The two marines in the lead had a set of hand held scanners out and they were sweeping the glowing blue instruments back and forth, looking for something.

"Sergeant, report," Zombie barked when he saw the suit with the appropriate bars on its pauldron.

The face shield of the trooper in question snapped open at an unseen command revealing the ruddy-faced sergeant inside with the remains of a cigar clamped between his teeth. "We got movement, one of my boys heard something and one of the scanners picked up on it to."

"So why aren't you zeroing in on it?"

The sergeant's eyes narrowed. "The sensors are fubar, we can't track anything and we can barely get hit at all. There's some kind of field interfering with them."

The scanners were slowly pacing back and forth in the hall while their squad mates crouched around them awaiting their verdict.

"Whoever built this place didn't want anyone snooping around where they shouldn't be," Red offered.

The scanner at the north end of the hall paused for a moment, freezing in place. One of his fingers slowly and cautiously made its way to his instrument and started to adjust some of the settings. Several long moments later Zombie heard a hushed "Got something" issue forth from the speaker in the squad leader's helmet.

With a silence not expected from twelve tons of walking metal the marines moved up to their scanner. "Up there, six meters, ceiling." The scanner reported, even though you could scream inside one of those suits and not be heard so long as the visor was closed the man still stayed silent, a natural reflex for someone on the hunt.

Who or whatever they were tracking was directly above a door that led to a room on the exterior of the building.

"What's in that room?" Zombie asked.

"Store room, we already cleared it," the sergeant responded.

"Let me."

The sergeant scowled at Zombie but didn't move to stop him.

The marines were lined up against each side of the hallway, seeking what cover they could find amidst the framing and debris strewn about. All of them had their weapons trained on the section of ceiling the scanners had pointed out. The scanners themselves crouched on opposite sides of the hallway closer to their target than anyone. Both of them were still trying to adjust their instruments.

Zombie and Snakes stopped beside the scanner on the right while Tingirl and Red stopped on the left. The shear size of the armored trooper beside him made Zombie feel like a small child, he just came up to the upper arm of the marine, no higher. 'This must be how kids feel.' "Any luck?"

A faint click signaled the trooper's activation of his external speakers. "No, this damn jamming field has everything screwed, I can't get a fix. Whatever it is is our size and warm, that's the best I can do."

"Then cover us."

"Sir?"

Zombie paid the corporal no mind as he slipped silently up to the doorway. The ceiling of the halls was just a facade, thin sheets of grating looking material that were only meant to hide all the ugly piping and wiring overhead, dozens of broken panels littered every hallway in the building.

"You ready," Zombie whispered as quietly as possible.

Snakes just nodded her head.

Zombie glanced back down the dead end hall and jerked a thumb up at the ceiling, several nods answered him back.

Zombie shouldered his autorifle and picked up a piece of thick plastic tubing out of the cluttered mess lining the floor. He stood up and grasped one end of the tubing in both hands. Snakes quietly counted, "One.....two....three!" On three Zombie jammed the piece of tube up into the ceiling panel as hard as he could.

With nothing holding it in the panel just fell as soon as one corner of it was lifted up spilling a black thrashing mass onto Zombie.

"Check fire!" Red yelled as the panel fell.

All the wind was shoved out of Zombie's lungs as a black thrashing mass slammed down onto him. Something hard and sharp raked his face before he managed to get a boot under whatever it was at shove it into the far wall. His chest heaved as he drew in a ragged breath and tried to re-inflate his lungs, the warm sticky trickle across his cheek told him that whatever it was that had gotten a hold of his face didn't want to let go."

"Lanii, yamtey! Ehius ehius! Elicnama ah yelbi nkomia pelinor savo sahtay, SAHTAY!" A high-pitched singsong voice cried.

Pulling a red-coated finger away from his cheek Zombie looked over at his attacker. His first impression was that the girl was tall, not that this was anything new to Zombie, it seemed to him that every non-Ankari sentient he met had at least a head on him. His second was that she had a lot of hair.

The girl did indeed have a lot of hair, a lot of pitch-black shiny hair. She had pulled it up into a ragnartail on the back of her head and Zombie guessed that it would probably fall past her waist if she had been standing up, rather than stuffed back into a corner pleading, he assumed, for her life.

"Anybody get that?" One of the troopers asked.

"Illiama, negatso lute? Ahmata galets ticlay, sahtay!"

The girl's panicked face was that of a china doll's, near perfect symmetry, absolutely smooth, and very pale. If not for the grease and dirt that covered it it might have been beautiful. Her eyes were more drawn out than an Ankari's coming to a point on the sides of her face rather than the usual roundness, and her ears were much longer and pointing back and up. Zombie though he saw a hint of incisors the next time she cried, "Sahtay!?"

"Medic, report to my position," the squad leader barked into his comm system.

"Anybody know what the hell 'sahtay' means?" Red asked.

The girl continued to try to drive herself deeper into the corner she was in.

"No clue, but I think it's Kizikan," Tingirl replied.

The Kizikan girl's eyes darted between Red and Tingirl.

"Sahtay? Mmmee...help...me help, ME HELP! SAHTAY!"

Levkil's voice came clearly across the comms, "A medic is on route, report sergeant."

"The contact appears to be a Kizikan female sir, maybe a couple of hundred, a thousand on the outside. I don't think she was here willingly."

Based off the girl's clothes Zombie agreed. A pair of khaki cargo pants and a small white tank top were all she was wearing but both were ripped and torn in countless places with stains all over them, some of which he suspected were blood. It looked like she hadn't gotten a change of clothes in months.

"Once the medic arrives resume your sweep. Sergeant Delaat?"

"Yeah?"

The lieutenant's voice came back tinged with annoyance. "Return to the command center with the girl."

"Yes sir."

A faint skittering was heard in the distance, like someone in cleats was walking on ferrocrete.

"What was that?" a trooper asked.

Whatever it had been they didn't hear it again as the girl went white and began to scream incoherently. "Yanatikno salertah ma lepga ni! Cryyteg nomosal ma nenea mel! Sahtay! Melnorni ahala no netsukio yerlah!"

"You think you can handle her?" the ruddy squad leader asked.

The girl continued to sit and scream.

"She ain't trying to go nowhere so yeah."

"Third squad, move out!"

The girl was still screaming when the medic arrived.

"What's wrong with her?" the trooper asked. A small red triangle on his pauldron identified him as a platoon medic.

"Isn't that what you're supposed to tell us?" Red sneered.

Zombie ignored her. "We don't know, we thought we heard something and then she just went crazy."

The medic nodded and started to approach the girl. "Hey, calm down...it's ok...you're safe," the trooper reassured her as he approached.

Apparently the girl had been oblivious of the troopers approach, she didn't even acknowledge his presence until one oh his black boots landed on the deck in front of her feet. Her eyes darted up to gaze at the medic and she immediately lunged forward trying to get by him. "Nemala tyr! Nemala lamiana!"

She didn't make it far, backed into a corner, wedged between a frame rail and two walls and with the medic taking up all the room in front of her there was nowhere for her to go as she hit the troopers chest, not that she stopped trying.

The medic's movements were gentle but there was still a tremendous amount of power behind them. The girl thrashed and screamed but she couldn't break free of his grasp and his calming words fell on deaf ears. "Kizikan right?" he asked as he pushed her back into her corner.

"We think," Zombie yelled over the girl who had given up trying to say anything and was now just howling.

The next time she rushed the medic he was ready for her. She tried to shove him backwards but he just wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close, there was a hiss and then the girl collapsed like a rag doll against the medic with only his arm holding her up. "She should be out for a while, is it alright if I go ahead and take her back to the command center?"

"Let's go," Zombie said.

"A little malnutrition and a lot of cuts and bruises, and I took care of those, but that's not what's interesting. Take a look at this," the medic held up his scanner. "Look at the way her blood vessels are constricted, look at the heart tissue, she's been under an incredible amount of stress."

"She was screaming her head off when we found her," Red said.

"That's not it, this is constant stress, I'm talking weeks, maybe months of nonstop stress. It's like she's been in combat for weeks on end with no rest."

"Ok, she's been stressed out, why?" Zombie asked.

The small break room where they were was crowded so some of them had to stand on their toes or peek around the edges to see. The room had only been meant to hold three bunk beds, one on each wall then a door, and nothing more. It sat right off the command center so that the command crew could catch a nap during long shifts or crises. The medic pulled back the edge of the sheet and uncovered the girl's right hip. "I don't know, but I'm willing to bet it has something to do with this." On the girl's hip was a mass of scar tissue, like someone had thrown paint against her leg and let it drip down, leaving her otherwise flawless skin marred.

"What is that?" Snakes asked.

"A burn," the medic declared, "and I think it was probably acid from the dripping."

"An acid burn?"

"Wonderful," Levkil said from his position at the foot of the bed. "But can anyone tell me why a Kizikan woman is crawling around a Vaygr base on a Dral world?"

No one answered.

"How long before she's up?"

The blonde haired medic thought about it before he answered, "Probably about three hours, I gave her a pretty heavy dose of anesthetic."

"If she's not up in two I want you to wake her up, we need to know what happened here." With that the Lieutenant forced his way through the pathfinders and his own sergeant and out the room, everyone else followed.

The command center had been transformed in the last two hours, the cups and debris left by the room's last crew had been tossed in a big pile by the entry way and all the manuals and reading materials were piled on the display table while a chubby analyst looked them over. Two more of the analysts were working away at a pair of computer terminals and the last of them was sitting at what was assumed to be the commanders desk while conversing with a hologram hovering right over the desk. The hologram itself was of a woman who while quite shapely was rather featureless, her body being made up of the constantly shifting swirl of a data stream. Having no need to stand the hologram's legs were simply hanging down in front of her like some ethereal ballerina.

"Any progress Dex?" LevKil asked the analyst at the commander's desk.

"We're through four code levels so far but there's close to fifty levels in total."

The holograph hovering over the table spoke up, her voice a strange but pleasant amalgamation of wind chimes and static. "We'd be farther along if this moron hadn't removed all my hacking and translation subroutines except for the Dral ones."

"Kioko I thought we'd need the extra space for analysis."

The hologram spun in the air like a fairy to regard her partner/controller, "They took up a lousy thirty five teraquads!"

LevKil cut off the tech's riposte with wave of his hand. "How is this affecting the data retrieval?"

The tech started to answer but his blue and purple partner cut him off. "The mainframe of this complex isn't Dral, it's a Vaygr design with some Binar equipment added on afterwards, pretty standard Dral holomatrix for data storage but a crappy Binar quantum comp for access to it and control. Since I don't have my Dral or my Binar hacking, translation, or interface routines I have to relearn and optimize it as I go. Every time I crack a level I refine my programming and go after the next one."

"Why can't you just go for the high level right away? All you've gotten so far are office supply requisitions and the menu for the cafeteria."

This time the tech fielded LevKil's question. "They use a recursive fractal algorithm to encode their data, each iteration of the code gets continuously more complex, and as you go deeper it gets more complex faster. If she just tried to crack the fiftieth level code right off the bat it would take foreve...."

"Three point seven one nine times ten to the thirty second years, give or take a decade," Kioko clarified.

"What she said, to get it. If we go through layer by layer we'll get there much faster."

"Six point four three eight times ten to the forth seconds, give or take."

LevKil nodded, it was going to take about seventeen hours and that would still be ahead of schedule. "Very well, I want to be kept updated on anything of interest you find."

"Aye sir," the tech replied.

"You might find this interesting," Kioko butted in.

"Shouldn't you be cracking the encryption?" lieutenant LevKil asked.

"Because of interface and translation delay I can only devote thirty one point two percent of my processing power to the task of decryption at any time, I'm using the rest of my cycles to cross reference and analyze the data that has been decoded. Now do you wanna know this or not?"

LevKil looked annoyed at being talked down to by a hologram but if an analysis team from Military Intelligence was using her like this then she was most likely sentient, though still a civilian. He bid her continue with a nod.

"The population of this station peaked approximately three years ago at roughly three thousand individuals, it's been declining ever since. The minimum occurred one week ago, two hundred and thirty."

"How do you know this?"

"Food requisitions," she said obviously very satisfied with herself.

LevKil gave the tech and his hologram a respectful nod, "Keep it up."

Zombie and his platoon were leaning against a bank of monitors that faced the display table when the radio crackled again.

"Lieutenant, we're getting ready to enter the tunnel now."

LevKil reached over and manipulated a few controls on the display table as the blank table suddenly came to life with the images from several troopers' helmet scanners. A few button pushes later and LevKil had each one displaying a different spectrum. Zombie had to give it to the Lieutenant, while he initially came off as a prick the young officer at least seemed to know his shit, though a pathfinder would have just meshed all the spectra together into one display.

"Proceed Sergeant Zamal."

On the screen the darkened tunnel stretched out into infinity, far away, nearly lost in the distance was the small bluish purple speck of the main lines but the line that ran down the left hand side of the tunnel was dark.

"Power line's dead," Zamal reported. "Cold." One of the soldiers looked over at the wall and the spinning image stopped on a group of scratches and pick marks. "Lots of those markings from inside are down here, they're on every wall." The camera panned up. "Even the ceiling." The troopers advanced on in silence, scanning their surroundings but finding nothing but a dark tunnel full of equally dark and empty lines.

"There's some evidence of weapon's fire, scorch marks, a stray round might have taken out the line." Zamal observed. "There's also so melted areas...I don't know why but it looks like something just melted out sections of the wall and floor, there's some damage to the line but nothing to take it out of commission."

"The girl's leg," Tingirl said, "the medic said it looked like an acid burn."

LevKil considered her a moment then went back to his displays, Zombie edged a little closer to the table.

"I'm not seei....wait a minute." The darkness on the screens didn't appear to change until you realized that that's all there was, no more tunnel, no more line, just darkness. For several moments the line was quiet and then the squad sergeant's voice returned. "Sir we're about at the branch to the comm relay and we've found an anomaly." As the grunts in the tunnel got closer to the anomaly it became clearer. The walls of the tunnel were covered in a thick layer of soot and ash, black as night. The floor and walls of the tunnel dropped away into infinity and the power line was ripped apart, ballooned out like it had over inflated and popped. "It looks like the line lost containment sir, I'm seeing a big chasm here, looks like the line blew and the plasma just ate out a cavern here, looks to be a good ten meters deep, maybe fifty long. I can see the line on the other side and it's energized, looks like the interlocks on that side worked but I think every bit of the plasma in this end got vented."

"So much for repairing it," Zombie said.

The display swung to the right and far out along the wall of the new cavern another tunnel end could be seen where the power line used to branch off to the comm system. "Sir I'd have to say that until we can get a repair crew in here the line is a total loss."

LevKil considered this for a moment before giving new orders. "Roger sergeant, set up a remote probe and return to..."

"What was that?"

The troopers voice was unexpected, so far the squad had kept quite and let their sergeant do the talking, to here one of the troopers say something had caught everyone off guard.

"Shut up Lema, this is an open comm."

"Sarge I saw something in the tunnel, elecscan."

The display that belonged to Zamal spun around to consider the far tunnel to the main lines. "How the hell could you see anything down there in elecscan with all that line interference?"

With all the troopers facing that direction Zamal's objection was reasonable, the other tunnel was hazy in elecscan from the stray emissions from the still energized line. "I swear I saw something sir."

"Anyone else see anything? Try all modes."

A chorus of negatives answered back.

"All right, set up the scanner and let's get out of here." The displays were a blur as the troopers set about their tasks but one kept watching the tunnel.

"There it is again!"

The sergeant's reflexes were superb and Zombie managed to see a flash of bright white amidst the sea of purple static. "Control, did you catch that?"

LevKil's hands were a blur as he called up the last five seconds of both Zamal and Lema's feeds. He froze both when a smear of white was just visible in the frame. "Roger Sergeant."

The troopers in the command center as well as the pathfinders and the analysts all worked their way a little closer to the displays, trying to catch a peek at what was so interesting.

"First and Third, up here, Second section keep on that scanner. Orders Control?"

"Hold your position," LevKil told them.

"Roger."

Moments drug into seconds, seconds into minutes as they waited to see if the sensor apparition would return but it didn't. "Might have been magnetic cavitation, maybe a surge in the line," said Sergeant Frost who had been silent in this until now.

"Maybe," LevKil conceded. "But I don't like it. Mr. Dex?"

The tech and his hologram both looked at the Lieutenant. "Yes sir?"

Kioko answered for him. "I'm through the seventh level and I have internal sensors, I can't shut down the dampening fields around the labs but I can see where everyone is."

"Good, keep an eye on that scanner's feed and if it sees anything or anything happens to the door into that tunnel I want alarms going off all over the place."

"Got it."

"Sergeant Zamal, fall back to the main building and seal up that door behind you."

"Aye sir."

"Chief hack a section to guard that tunnel entrance and the generator. We need to clear this building completely before we go running off to have a look at the rest of this place."

"Yes sir," Sergeant Frost replied.

"Well this is interesting," Dex said from his station. Everyone turned towards him expecting something more but he didn't even look up. It wasn't until Kioko waved a nonexistent foot in front of his face that he realized he had everyone's attention.

"Care to elaborate?" Zombie asked.

"Well it looks like someone tried to wipe the mainframe's memory."

"Tried?" Frost asked.

"Yes sir, whoever it is bombed everything not hardwired into the interface, that's why it's so hard for Kioko to interact with the comp."

"What's this mean for data retrieval?" LevKil asked, unless they got some answers about what this station did then their mission would be a bust.

"It's fine, it'll just take a while. Like I said they tried to wipe the core, but they failed. It's a holocore, you can't wipe it clean without a total destabilization and realignment cycle. Whoever tried to kill the core just tried to eliminate the last matrices where the data was laid down. We may have lost a little rez on some of the records but for the most part they're intact. If this had been an automated system they would have just physically destroyed the core. Whoever did this did not know his way around a computer."

"Eighth level down, general controls released," Kioko reported. Throughout the base the sound of doors shutting and locking could be heard. "I don't have the high security stuff but I have most low level controls now."

LevKil cracked a small smile. "Looks like we may be getting this under control."

Author's Notes

**Acknowledgements:**

Lighthawk - Proofreader

Warpwizard - Proofreader

Feedback: 

Come on over and bitch me out: http:s87753679.onlinehome.us/forums/index.php?actidx

For updates and just my general bitching: 

You don't need to tell me I suck, I'm well aware of that.


	4. FUBAR

**Aliens: Genocide**

By: bsmart

**Disclaimer:** Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

"…" Normal Speech

'…' Thought

**Chapter Four: FUBAR**

"I will never get this shit out of my joints, never!"

Zombie didn't reply to Snake's outburst over the general comms, but he certainly sympathized. The last twelve hours had been fairly quiet but now the predicted sandstorm had arrived and the word storm didn't do it justice. 'More like sand hurricane,' Zombie thought as he clicked over his transmitter to the Pathfinders private frequency. "We'll get our suits blown clean after this, don't worry about it."

"I'm more worried about the sandblasting it's getting now. Some of the paint's starting to go and this shit was hard coated on."

"Green six, Zombie, sitrep."

"Generator one clear, starting on two."

"Roger," and with that Zombie returned to his thoughts, walking his gear around the generators while one of the infantry squads searched them didn't require a whole lot of brain power.

The Kizikan girl had woken up two hours after she'd gone down, but her disposition hadn't improved. She hadn't screamed her head off like before, instead she had just crouched in the corner of the room mumbling in her own language, to out of it, unable to, or unwilling to talk to them in basic. Eventually LevKil and Frost gave up on her and had the medic sedate her again.

Kioko and Dex had kept after the computer logs and were making great progress but nothing of interest had yet been found, whoever had classified things at this installation had decided that almost everything important was as encrypted as possible.

A few hours before Kioko had managed to take control of the last doors in the building that were still sealed and opened them so that the marines could clear them. It turned out to be unnecessary. Zombie had been there when the first door had been opened and the wretched stench that had rolled out of the room and sent half of a squad of battle hardened Marines flailing for their visor catches so that the vomit didn't fill them and the other half wishing they could puke so they would have something else to smell and taste for a while. Whatever had been in the labs had been burned down to ash, just like everything else in them. Metal lab tables were bent and sagging, a few thin walled cabinets had simply melted. Puddles of molten plastic were everywhere along with shards of ceramic, evidence of temperatures rarely seen outside of weapons fire. Nothing organic survived.

"What the hell is that?" one of the Marines had asked.

"No clue," Zombie replied as he choked back his own bile. He stepped into the room with his rifle at his shoulder but he didn't expect to find anything. Glass and embrittled ceramic crunched beneath his feet with each step. He had to walk slowly to avoid losing his footing in the fine ash that coated the floor. The squad of marines and Tingirl fanned out into the room, inspecting it, looking for something that might tell them more about the place but even the most cursory glance told them that weren't going to find anything.

"Take a look at this," one of the marines called out. The two pathfinders and the marine's sergeant all went over. The marine was pointing to a line of angled holes in the ceiling. "Think these are important?"

The sergeant used his mechanically augmented height to poke a finger into one of the drink can sized holes and pulled out a soot coated tube. "Looks like some kind of big ass flare."

"They were pointed at this counter," Tingirl said thumping it with the butt of her rifle. Puddles of melted thermoplastic and other unidentifiables covered the top of it. A new wave of stench filled the air as the table shook from the impact.

"And there's another line of them on the other side," the sergeant added.

Zombie nodded. "I guess they wanted whatever was here destroyed."

"Makes sense, these things were self contained, no outside energy or fuel required. Even if this place was blacked out all you'd have to do is pull a cord or a lever and whump, barbeque." The sergeant tossed the canister onto the ruined table.

"Looks like they were all over the place," Tingirl said.

Now that he knew what to look for Zombie saw the holes for the canisters all over the place. "These things probably destroyed everything in here and then the fire and the insulation turned this place into an oven, wiped out everything."

"I saw a set up like this once in a germ lab. The had plasma torches in every room and I mean every room." The sergeant said. "If any of those little buggers ever got out they could lock down any room in the place and flash fry it, course you were kinda screwed if you got caught in the room."

Something about what the sergeant had said still bothered Zombie. In a simple lab he might have expected to find the local terminals wiped, the hard copy reports incinerated and all the important equipment either bashed or disabled. If they had been making something maybe a few explosives set off to ruin something but the flares, the only thing that made sense was that whatever had been in that lab, and the other's just like it in the base, had been biological.

"Zombie, Green six. We're coming out. Gen's clear, scanners in place."

"Roger."

Kioko was getting tremendously bored. Even with all the layers of security she had already cracked she had yet to come across hardly anything worth noting. In fact it had been a good ninety seconds since her sifting programs had gleaned anything from the simple administration records they had access too. Growing tired of the endless mind numbing work she had cut back on her sifter's allotment of processing power and turned the excess over to her cognitive subroutines. As ugly a kludge as the base's computer was on the outside it was worse on the inside. Every segment of it required a cycle eating translation matrix to allow it to communicate with the next piece of hardware and it reduced already crappy equipment to the digital equivalent of a retarded wamp rat. Kioko was used to feeling faster and smarter and strong when she plugged into a mainframe; being attached to this thing made her fell dumber. She heard Dex start to ask her something and while it would take him a few more seconds to finish she knew he was asking why she'd shifted some of her cycles out of her processing matrix and her response was already considered and dumped into her verbal subroutines within three microseconds. Something along the lines of "I'm bored out of my freaking mind, shove off," she'd let her subroutine polish up to something suitably hostile. That was the part she hated most about dealing with these analysis jobs, she had to communicate verbally with Dex and the others, she much preferred the black jobs where she would be plugged into a suit, then she could communicate with them directly through their brainwaves. Still not as fast as she could think but still infinitely faster then modulating pressure waves.

Trying to find a way to get to the interesting bits of this shit box a little faster she peeled off a few hundred trillion cycles a second of her processing power and put them to work trying to clean up the translation matrices and data retrieval subroutines of the system. A mental warning went off in her head as her cracking subroutines broke through another level of security and new data started to flood in. 'Now this looks interesting.'

The AI had been sitting dormant inside the mainframe ever since the last user had tried to wipe the computer and shut down the power; even the powering up and restarting of its home didn't wake it. When the layer of security protecting it was finally stripped away the AI began to come on line. Not entirely sentient like Kioko it didn't need to be, it had a single function and it only had to be smart enough to stay ahead of an intruder for a few tenths of a second. However the AI was as foreign and unfamiliar with the computer as the intruder it now sensed was. The AI could dimly sense that part of the intruder had went straight for the next level of encryption and started to try to force it open, likewise it noted that other portions of it had broken off and were starting to download every bit of data on this level. For a few millionths of a second the AI considered this, weighing different factors and variables against its presets and the conditions it was just barely aware of until it determined that the invader had no right to be in the computer and it leapt into the action its paranoid installer had deemed necessary.

Dex was fuming at Kioko's flippant dismissal of him. Their positions in the intelligence branch were iffy so her comments weren't exactly insubordination; in fact he wasn't sure she was even his subordinate. As a sentient AI Kioko was entitled to all the rights and privileges accorded to regular flesh and blood sentients in the Confederation and as such she had a rank, she drew pay, and she even got leave from time to time. In fact she had spent a portion of her first paycheck having her holographic appearance customized and her emitters upgraded. He supposed that technically she might even outrank him, if he knew what her rank was. In some ways she depended on him, to move her physical parts around and get her from place to place and in many ways he relied on her, there was no way he could even attempt to crack into the mainframe. So like many AI/tech relationships they had become essentially partners and their ranks had never come up. 'She still didn't have to be a bitch about it.'

"Shit!"

Dex lost his balance and almost fell backwards out of his chair as the holographic representation of his partner that had been static for the last few moments suddenly sprang to life.

"What?"

"There's another AI in here!"

In reality Kioko and the resident AI were already well into it before she had even completed her first expletive. Operating off of instructions that had been programmed into it but never verified the AI raced through the electronic pathways of the system to where the self-destruct was located, intent on destroying itself before anything could happen. When it got to it's destination it tried to initiate the program but it refused to. For a few nanoseconds the AI paused and tried to digest this new information, but without Kioko's cognitive powers the AI paused too long in trying to decide what to do.

Flowing through the pathways of the computer like water Kioko chased after her prey. She had no idea what the thing wanted or was supposed to do. It could be a simple entertainment program that some bored programmer had stored here so he could access it from where ever or it could be trying to call for its masters. Whatever the things intention was she wasn't going to let it happen.

For a second and third time the AI tried to activate the self-destruct and failed. The suicidal program experienced a moment of electronic panic as its single stored instruction failed to work. Even though it lacked its pursuers cognitive abilities the AI was still smart enough to look for some other way to accomplish its goal. Being native to the system allowed the AI to move quickly through it and the synapses in its electric brain hadn't completely closed before it was racing off through the system again. It wasn't fast enough.

The AI's pause at the self destruct had given Kioko the time she needed to catch up like an amoeba she closed in around the enemy AI, slipping through circuits that had never been meant used in this way to corner her target. With a lunge she fell on her target, but it moved first. Kioko only managed to slice off the subroutine that had been accessing the self-destruct; the smaller and now faster AI darted out of her grasp at the last second.

The holographic Kioko snarled in frustration as her digital self in the computer swallowed the captured subroutine for analysis. The enemy AI slid through lines and registers, its small form allowing it to move quickly through its home. Behind it Kioko gave chase, her raw power allowing her to keep after the AI by simply bulldozing through any problems in her way. With a few microseconds to kill before she ran the AI down again Kioko shifted a bit of her attention away from the chase and dumped cycles into ripping the captive subroutine apart, learning everything she could about it.

The AI rapidly searched for some way to carry out its orders but kept failing. It considered dropping biological containment for a time but moved on when it decided it needed something immediate and the Other was almost upon it. It tried to activate halon fire extinguishers but failed and had several layers of its programming peeled off by the other for its trouble. The AI was scrambling around the system, its core searching for a way to destroy the base when one of its tendrils spied an open comm link to the generators. Dumping itself into the comm system through the tendril the AI barely managed to avoid being consumed as the Other crashed in and filled the cache it had been hiding in.

A cautious pluck at the comm line revealed that the computer core had opened up a simple radio link with the primary generators after the main connection had been severed and it was using the link to control them. If it had been capable of jumping for joy it would have but it wasn't, instead it started to pour over the system looking for a way to carry out its orders.

Both her holographic and electronic bodies howled in frustration as Kioko wiped the cache the enemy AI had been hiding in. The little bastard had been running her on a merry chase but after digesting the captured subroutine she had realized that the stupid little thing had been trying to destroy the computer. The self-destruct had already been used though so now it was having to try to figure out a way to carry out its orders and in her experience the dumber the AI the more literal it took its directions. The thing could literally try anything to accomplish its goal. It had already tried three times to kill everyone to prevent anyone from accessing it, apparently its program didn't consider her 'someone' and that irked her, and twice to physically destroy the core. She had to catch it and stop it before it could do anything permanent. Taking full advantage of her processing power Kioko began to expand, to fill out and control as much of the computer as she could to limit the places it could run to.

A sudden burst of activity from two separate registers caught her attention. Pouring herself into the comm section she spotted her prey. "Gotcha!" she yelled as she surged in after the AI. Whatever it was doing consumed so much of its attention that the AI didn't even try to get away as she descended on it. With sadistic glee Kioko ripped the enemy AI apart, tearing off subroutines and memory segments with relish, digitally ripping, tearing and rending her opponent until only the core of its program remained, blind, deaf, and mute. Like a great predator Kioko settled onto her kill and began to feed, taking a deep pleasure in digesting her opponent and gleaming every bit of information she could from it.

"What in the hell is going on?" LevKil demanded as he strode up beside Dex.

"I don't know, she said there was another AI in the computer."

"What could it do?" LevKil snapped. He needed information if he was going to make a decision.

"Anything, it just depends on what its supposed to do. I've seen guys keep simulated hooker AIs on their work stations before."

Kioko's triumphant yell broke up their conversation. "Gotcha!"

Dex looked up to see his partner smiling cruelly as she appeared to chew on something. One of the quirks of AIs like Kioko was that as they became sentient and grew more intelligent they started to anthropomorphize different aspects of what they did, putting them in human terms. He really wished Kioko hadn't picked eating as her way of relating what she did when she disassembled opposing AIs. "What was it?"

Kioko made a production out of licking the corners of her translucent blue mouth. "Little bastard was trying to destroy th...DAMN IT! He used the radio link to crack the generators, he's getting them to overload!"

"Stop it!" LevKil ordered.

"What do you think I'm doing!"

Dex could see Kioko's readouts spiking. Whatever was going on inside the computer was happening to fast for them to comprehend.

'For a stupid little AI he was almost brilliant,' Kioko thought as she tried to save everyone's lives including her own. Part of sentience was having a sense of self-preservation and Kioko didn't want to get deleted before she finished her haul in the service and got a chance to buy a droid body for herself. Whether by accident or design, 'Accident,' the resident AI had managed to access the generators controls through the comm system thereby avoiding coming out of hiding and being where she could easily find it. Now she was trying to find what it had done and fix it with the generator control system fighting her on one end and a painfully slow radio link bottling things up on the other.

"I can't reverse it," her holographic self informed Dex and the Lieutenant.

Kioko had given up working with the control system to get the generators under control it was fighting her too hard so she did the next best thing, she copied it and saved it in her memory and then she tore it apart and ripped the chunks of code right out of the hardware substituting links to her for it. For a few microseconds the influx of incomprehensible data threatened to deluge her but as she digested the former control system she made sense of it.

"I'm gonna have to dump it!"

The thought of destroying the generators was suddenly repugnant to Kioko but she quickly suppressed the emotion as an unfiltered piece of the program she had had to incorporate quickly. She'd excise those demons later. Even with only moments to work with the other AI had thoroughly wrecked the situation with the generators, both of the capital ship class power cores were deep into an overload by the time she got control and most of the safety systems had either been deactivated or wasted. Using the remnants of her last meal as a guide Kioko looked for a way to prevent the inevitable life-ending explosion that was seconds away, and she found it in an engineers laziness. As it turned out both power cores had originally been designed as power plants for capital ships but had apparently been retasked to this base at some point. Instead of making any major changes to the core packages they had received the people who had made this place had simply installed them and walked away leaving Kioko what she needed to save them, after a fashion.

A pop of static told Dex that Kioko had accessed the expeditions radio channel and she yelled. "Everyone brace for EMP! All troops out of the generators, NOW!"

In space combat it was common to try to disable a target by overloading it's computer systems with powerful ionic charges. Naturally you couldn't just let this happen to your ship so most civilizations had come up with schemes to rid ships of the extra charge, in space these systems tended to be light shows and little else, but in an atmosphere they were something else. 'No choice,' Kioko consoled herself. The generators had already moved passed their maximum output, over a hundred and thirty percent and climbing in less than another minute they would overload their primary coils and crack them, then the whole generator would come apart in a classic thermonuclear explosion, the construct was hoping to avoid that. The cores were already producing more power than the base could consume and normally that would have only accelerated the destruction of all life within thirty kilometers but Kioko was redirecting that excess into the powerful capacitor banks used to start the generators and the ones that could store the excess charge for the dissipaters. 'Just a few more seconds,' Kioko thought as she silenced yet another alarm, the capacitors were well over capacity and the dielectric in them was starting to break down, at this point the banks were in danger of melting when they discharged and fires were breaking out around them in the lower levels of the generator buildings.

She could hear Dex and the Marine asking her what was going on but she didn't bother to explain, she'd be shutdown before she could finish anyways.

'Almost there,' she told herself, and then the laws of several different flavors of physics gave up. Kioko had already taken in, processed, and silenced the alarm before the enunciator could even light up on the generator console in the control room. The dielectric was breaking down and the plates of the capacitor were softening in the heat, in another tenth of a second they would get close enough and the dielectric weak enough for the capacitor to discharge, she didn't have a choice, they all had to go at once or one of the generators could still blow. Crossing her subroutines Kioko triggered her plan.

"Execute." Kioko's single word caught Dex off guard and silenced the Lieutenant's and his questions just before she winked out of existence.

"Oh shit." They both said.

Deep inside both power cores things happened very quickly. Relays that shouldn't have been able to work unless someone gutted their safety interlocks flipped. In each core the startup bank of capacitors discharged into the already running generators, the total energy output of each unit over the course of nearly ten seconds was dumped back into it in a nanosecond. In the second core everything happened as Kioko had wanted, the start up capacitor's charge disrupted the generator's field, throwing it off balance and stressing the fifteen hundred ton strator to its design limits, and then the charge from the dissipaters hit. With its field disrupted and its physical parts stressed to their limits the generator couldn't handle the in rush of power and the primary coils cracked. Only instead of thermonuclear hell the full charge of the generator roared back through the lines, superheating, liquefying, and destroying them but not before surging through the dissipaters and ending it. Molten metal sprayed from the destroyed lines, shrapnel ruptured the generator casing as the primary coils and stator tore themselves apart, and fires started throughout the building but compared to what could have happened it couldn't have turned out better.

The first generator wasn't as lucky. Everything happened according to plan until the dissipater capacitors tried to unload into the generator. A relay tried to close to open a pathway from the multi-ton bank to the generator but worn by time and lack of maintenance it didn't move nearly fast enough. By the time it closed and the dissipater capacitor tried to discharge the field in the generator was already stabilizing. The new influx of energy managed to crack the primary coils but not by nearly enough. Rather than destroy the generator and prevent a nuclear explosion, it caused one. The coils discharged trying to dump the contained energy in them into the dissipater but the capacitor that stood between them hadn't come close to emptying itself. Rather than venting harmlessly into the surrounding area the generator's charge surged back into its fractured coils along with even more energy from the capacitor. It wasn't as big as it would have been but the explosion was large enough.

The crack of the second generator discharging was loud enough to be heard through the thick ferrocrete walls of the complex but LevKil already knew what had happened. Before the thunder-like boom every light in the control center had shut down along with every computer and a white like a million arc lights had seared every exposed surface in the control center. He thought he could feel the tidal wave of electromagnetic energy moving through him, it had to be massive he thought, without any shields to temper it. The second light caught him by surprise as the first generator disappeared. A roiling ball of white-hot plasma engulfed the generator building blinding him and shaking the control center hard enough to dump him and several marines on their tails. He jumped back to his feet just in time to watch the pressure wave rocket across the dusty ground between them. "Get the shutters!" He watched the wave obliterate the delicate antennas of the comm shed just as a thick steel wall dropped in front of the window.

When the wave hit five centimeters of hardened steel bowed in far enough and hard enough to spider web the thick transperisteel of the window, others weren't so lucky. Either from lack of maintenance or bad luck one of the shutters hadn't operated. When the wave struck the transperisteel had no chance. Shattering into a thousand pieces the remains of the window flayed two of the analysts alive, shredding their bodies in a hail of razor sharp shards; farther back and away several marines who had doffed their armor were caught as well. The wave burst into the control center like a flaming fist, a jet of red hot gases enveloping the remains of the analysts and turning them to char before driving deeper and catching some of the still living marines in its heat, burning their already bleeding bodies. A few screamed, they al died.

Inside the enclosed space LevKil could still see the wave moving but it came with such speed he couldn't avoid it. It felt like he'd been kicked by a burning battlemech when it struck him and threw him across the room, his back hit something solid and for a moment he thought it would hurt when his head caught up, but it didn't, he was unconscious before his nerves could protest the abuse.

"Everyone brace for EMP! All troops out of the generators, NOW!"

"You heard her, everyone OUT NOW!" Zombie roared. The voice sounded a little familiar but he wasn't going to get legalistic about the chain of command now, if someone had broadcast in the open like that it was likely damned important. He'd question it later. "Get clear! Get clear!" That was when Zombie noticed that the almost pleasant hum of the generators was starting to take on an angry snarl. "All pathfinders on me!"

Zombie watched as the marines started to trickle out of the second generator building and Tingirl and Red jump over the top of the building, their jump jets alight. The snarl was quickly building and he could feel the vibration through his suit. "Come on come on..." Tingirl dropped easily to the ground beside him and Snakes but Red shorted her jump, landing lightly atop the roof before walking to the edge and starting to drop the rest of the way.

Hidden from view by meters of ferrocrete and with his sensors swamped amid the leakage from the generators there was no warning. One moment Zombie was standing watching Red drop off the side of the building and the next everything in his gear went dark and rigid. Without any electricity keeping it opaque his front view port lightened and admitted the pure white glare of the generator he was standing next to's dissipaters unloading. One whole panel of the building had gone pure white, arcs of energy rippling across its surface and the metal buckled under the assault. Zombie tried to move to shield his eyes but his suit was a leaden coffin holding him tight. A split second later the ground beneath them bucked up almost two meters, Snakes and Tingirl went down but some how Zombie stayed upright, his eyes locked on Red as her gear started to crumple, with one foot already off the building and in the air her suit went limp and started to fall. Then the sky exploded.

On the far side of generator two generator one was ripping itself apart.

As bad as the pure white light of the dissipaters was the sickly yellow glare that filled the sky and outlined Red was worse. This close to the explosion there was little delay between the sight and the sound. The pressure wave from the blast hit Red, throwing the limp body of her gear end over end far above and behind Zombie. Immediately behind it came the fireball, roiling across the top of the generator building in front of him the ball of hot gas searing everything before it. Again the ground buckled as the gigantic pressure wave of the blast echoed off the bedrock deep below the plateau and came back up. The ground around Zombie vomited up and he felt himself thrown up and then falling. With no control over his descent all Zombie could do was watch as the door into the second generator building suddenly vomited flame and marines, but only pieces of the later.

The image of the dying soldiers was seared into his mind as his gear rotated around the ground filled his view.

Author's Notes

**Acknowledgements:**

The usual, Lighthawk, Warpwizard, psianogen.

**Notes:**

1) Haha! Boom!

Feedback: updates and just my general bitching: http: don't need to tell me I suck, I'm well aware of that.


End file.
